Outline of Video Fourteen: "Does the Mind Shape the World?", Sept. 15

• Kant: all knowledge begins with sense, but relationships and structures are provided by the mind
• Different kinds of knowledge
• a priori knowledge: knowledge based on concepts that organize or structure experience and that are presupposed in experience (e.g., space, time, causality)
• a posteriori knowledge: knowledge that depends on experience
• Copernican revolution in epistemology: objects must conform to mind; the world in itself (noumenal) is unknowable; only world as experienced (phenomenal) by mind is knowable
• The a priori or rational context for scientific inquiry is like our presupposed language
• Romantics (e.g., Humboldt): each culture/language organizes the world differently
• Nietzsche: thought is based on the grammar of a language
• Critique of Kant: rather than revealing the universal, necessary characteristics of reason itself, Kant's categories express only Enlightenment, German (or European) 18th-Century presuppositions
• Conclusions: our perceptions are always shaped by our conceptual schemes